Language is truly multi-faceted, and I feel like it is difficult to explain how differently a multilingual person thinks. For me, from living here in the States, I certainly feel more confident with my English than Japanese; however, there are many instances where my mind processes information in Japanese instead. My other multilingual friends and I have talked about this before, and it is interesting yet challenging to describe how we can code-switch between two languages both explicitly with words and implicitly with thought. For example, when people evoke a sudden emotional reaction from me such as fear or surprise, Japanese is the first language that comes out of my mouth. Even in class, I have had moments when I get called on, and I subconsciously answer in Japanese. I have also had friends, who are not multilingual, point out the differences in hand gestures, tones, and movement I use when switching between languages. When I first heard about this, I had no idea what they were talking about because to me, I am just communicating as I always do, just in a different language. It's interesting to understand how even though I am not making any huge change internally and with my thoughts, the parts of language such as hand gestures and other forms of communication, also come out.

This is so evident especially in business marketing strategies abroad as well. Because culture affects the way that individuals perceive information (and whether or not they choose to take it seriously and follow it), message processing is taken into consideration when working with any international audience. In the business and marketing class I took in Japan, we studied the differences in marketing strategies that companies have to take into consideration when doing international sales. One of the things that the professor, who is natively from Taiwan, taught us was that many companies (particularly Western companies) have difficulty and used to fail marketing in Japan because the Japanese public had such specific needs in what needs to be in their advertisement and messages for success. Their processing fluency had to be taken into consideration, and this is something that companies needed to learn. This works with healthcare, as the article addresses, as well because certain methods need to be applied for different audiences to take healthcare seriously.

This supports the study by that was conducted on Japanese and American participants to measure their cultural display rules. The study had the participants from two contrasting cultures, individually, watching emotion stimulant videos. What was found initially was that both Japanese and American participants both expressed similar displays of emotion. What was surprising, however, was when this study was conducted with a researcher present in the room with the participant. For the American participants, there was no significant difference between their displays of emotion with or without the researcher. For Japanese participants, however, there was a significant difference as the participants de-amplified their emotions and ultimately suppressed them. This study concluded that different cultures have different display rules.

This study took me by surprise as I had never heard of this kind of cultural difference in the way people take pictures. I find that this is reflective of the whole individualistic/collectivistic difference between American and Japanese cultures. People in individualistic cultures like America value individual autonomy. This is reflected in the portraits because the individual's face is large and the main point of focus. On the contrary, in collectivistic cultures like Japan, the person is a part of a group which explains why the person's face is not the large point of focus; the face is a part of the whole which is the res of the body. I had never heard that these cultural differences can influence such act such as portrait taking which made this section of the article interesting to hear.

This argument falls perfectly to a concept I studied in my culture class when I was abroad in Japan. In class, we had to each give a presentation on a cultural aspect of Japan, and the one I chose was Amae which is actually a cultural entity that is not found in Western culture and therefore does not even have a direct translation for. Amae is a concept that is seemingly unique to Japanese culture and is actually so prevalent in the culture that it is becoming an engrossing problem in Japanese society. This being said, explaining Amae was actually pretty challenging because although the Japanese students in the class know the term on the back of their hand, the exchange students in the class may have been hearing about it for the first time. That is what I recalled about when reading this passage.

It's interesting to recognize just how much social media and technology has influenced the ways of social change and globalization. Societies that do not have as great of an access to such resources (can even be applied to this country in the past) was very much in touch with traditional ways of shaping society. Without social media/technology, the main source of information and knowledge of the world was gained through conversations within the community and taught by older generations. As the world becomes more globalized, however, individuals are learning from outside resources (other societies) and therefore able to gain more insight on different perspectives on how to live and run their communities. This ties to the discussion in class today about how people in previous generations have been more tolerant on racial discrimination because that was how their communities socialized them; however, as globalization happens, these individuals are experiencing and learning that there is more out in the world and that their past thoughts/values are based off of their limited knowledge back then.

Although I hear about the concepts of individualistic and collectivistic cultures (and their differences), I had never considered this difference in regards to justice before. I paused when reading this sentence mainly because of how ironic and controversial I find this difference. As a member of a collectivistic culture, I had always valued the views of care and concern for others; however, I had not taken the thought of how this value precedes over our value of justice before. Thinking about this now, I realize that this "care and concern for others is more important than justice" is actually very prevalent in our culture and even present in our media. It's interesting to recognize your own culture's values from a third-party's perspective.

This reminds me of what is currently happening/what has currently been happening in Japanese society. There has been a significant decline in childbirth; families are having less children which is predicted to have significant negative effects to society. Although there is a plethora of reasons as to why this is becoming more common (and therefore a larger issue), one of them is the change in social norms for women. Women have joined the workforce and therefore feel less incentive or desire to have children since leaving work for childbearing would affect their work status/cause a pause in their career. It is interesting how these sociological changes in social norms has effect in the way society views the average family.

This is definitely a new concept of family that has become more and more prevalent (particularly in Western societies) today. There is research which suggests that although marriage is not necessarily on a decline, cohabitation is on the uprise as many young adults choose to move in and cohabitate (then get comfortable and see less of a point in getting married). It will be interesting to see how the world of psychology comes to define family-- I wonder if the definition of family will truly exceed past marriage (requiring legal marriage first before being considered as a family).